


steal some covers, share some skin

by tremontaine



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Cuddling & Snuggling, Fluff and Angst, Multi, OT3, Porn with Feelings, Threesome - F/M/M, Touch-Starved
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-31
Updated: 2014-10-31
Packaged: 2018-02-23 09:12:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,509
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2542154
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tremontaine/pseuds/tremontaine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Steve Rogers and Natasha Romanov have conveniently overlapping issues (to wit: touch-starvation and excessive practice in the art of being lonely), and Bucky Barnes is the functional one, which surprises nobody.</p>
            </blockquote>





	steal some covers, share some skin

Natasha liked to watch them. Steve caught on to that pretty quick – the second day, he thought. She was very good at watching people without looking as if she was watching them, that came with the job, but Bucky reeled him in for a kiss in the living room, brief and pretty chaste, and when he looked over at Natasha after her blue eyes were wide and fascinated and she was smiling, a tiny upturn of the corners of her mouth.

He didn’t think much of it at first. He was fascinated by her too, by all the things she had decided to let him see, and whenever she walked into a room it was sort of like seeing her for the first time all over again. Steve had had those long legs round his waist, over his shoulders; he knew what her hands felt like on his bare chest, his hips, his cock; he had kissed her breasts and spanned her waist with his hands and seen her face flushed red and undone with ecstasy. It was like… being blinkered and then having them taken away. You saw everything – or Steve did, at any rate; he wasn’t about to ask anyone else if they, having fallen in love with two of their closest friends at once, experienced a weird perspective shift in the way they looked at them that led to extensive ogling – in this whole new light, not just more, but shaded differently too.

Steve was an artist. He could turn his appreciation for beauty on and off, as it were, in order to get the job done; but oh the delight of not having to turn it off anymore, because the job, in a sense –

This metaphor was getting away from him, he felt. Anyway. The difference between the way he looked at Bucky and Natasha and the way Natasha looked at Bucky and him was that Natasha’s attention seemed especially caught by Bucky and Steve when they were close: when they kissed, when Bucky touched him, sprawled across Steve’s lap on the couch. She couldn’t stop looking at them then, tracing the lines of their bodies with her eyes the way Steve would study an artist’s model, curious and fascinated, and when Steve once made the mistake of letting on that he’d noticed she had gone pink and left the room for some made-up reason.

By the end of the first month it was obvious. If you wanted Natasha Romanov’s full and undivided attention, put Bucky Barnes and Steve Rogers in front of her and make them kiss. Or hug. Or stand close and knot each other’s ties.

“Yeah I’ve noticed,” said Bucky. He looked at Steve curiously. “So our girl likes a show.” He smiled, that slow, sexy curl of his mouth that had had half the girls in Brooklyn falling for him seventy years ago and still would today if he ever turned it on anyone but Steve and Tasha. “We’ll give her one some time, what do you think?”

Steve hated being put on display. He could handle it just fine, because he had been on tour with the USO and had not learnt nothing while he was there, but he _hated_ it. Thus, it made no kind of sense whatsoever that the idea of – of putting on a show with Bucky for Natasha’s benefit was making him a little hot under the collar.

“Sure,” he managed. Not a striptease, but – get the armchair into their bedroom, maybe, drop her in that and make her promise not to move till he and Bucky were done – fuck on the bed till she was desperate to join them – he shifted in his chair.

“You’re a filthy exhibitionist,” Bucky said fondly. “The things I’m discovering about you.”

Steve went red. “I’m really not.”

“For Nat, though.”

“Yeah.” It wasn’t exhibitionism if it was for Natasha, or so ran his somewhat muddled line of reasoning. “She’ll never ask for it,” he added suddenly.

Bucky looked thoughtful. “No more she will.” He stirred a spoon of sugar into his tea, swinging the spoon widdershins, for which either of their mothers would have rapped his knuckles: stir tea widdershins and you stir up Old Nick. Not, Sarah Rogers would have added dryly, that either of you boys needs his help to get your sorry selves into hot water.

Steve had a feeling they were getting into hot water now. He paused a minute. Then he said, “She doesn’t really touch us.” Not outside of bed. Natasha didn’t seem to know hello and goodbye kisses were things that happened, she looked so surprised every time Bucky gave her one. She didn’t really cuddle, she didn’t touch him any more frequently than she already had before… this. Bucky gave out physical affection like it was free candy on Halloween. Natasha didn’t seem to know what to do with her hands if you smiled at her.

Steve could relate.

“You’re the one who hates PDA,” said Bucky. The look he gave him was distinctly amused.

Steve’s eyebrows climbed.

“OK, we both do.” It was ingrained. Hugs and hands on shoulders and pats on the back were one thing, but it would never occur to either of them to kiss each other on the street. Natasha, certainly, but not each other. Inside, though… “I’d probably have a hard time with it too.”

“If?”

“If I’d got away from HYDRA without anyone to go to.”

“Wait. All those times we slept in the bed together, was it non-consensual touching? Did you just put up with it because of me?”

Bucky started laughing. Steve grinned. “This is serious. The internet’s very clear that this is serious.”

“The internet’s full of idiots.”

“Idiots and porn,” Steve agreed.

“No, I meant: you were there and I trust you and I wanted, you know…”

“Cuddles.”

“To be touched,” said Bucky. Seventy years ago he would have deliberately made it sound schmaltzy. “Nat didn’t have that, I’m betting.” For a moment he looked guilty, like he felt he should have broken through the wipe years earlier and defected with her when she escaped.

“It’s not a problem,” said Steve firmly. “They’re her boundaries. It’s just I sort of wonder if she feels like she’s not allowed, or something.”

“That… would say a number of unpleasant things about her exes,” said Bucky. He was looking at Steve with an odd, guarded look, restrained and careful and – if Steve didn’t know him better he would even have said exasperated.

At any rate, it kept Steve from voicing his suspicion that Bucky himself was the only ex Natasha had, and the conversation moved on.

+++

But privately he thought he’d try an experiment. The next time Nat was over… she usually curled into the armchair, but he’d get her onto the couch, hold her close. She’d tell him pretty quick if she didn’t want it, and that would be fine, and he would know. Nat was awfully private, even with them, even now, and Steve had been taking his cues from her and trying not to make her uncomfortable, but if she did want it, and didn’t – this was at the heart of it, the thing he _really_ couldn’t say to Bucky – if she did want it but didn’t know how to ask for affection that wasn’t directly sexual, maybe it would give her an in. If she needed one.

See, Bucky grew up with two loving parents and three baby sisters who hung off him like ornaments on a Macy’s Christmas tree. For a long stretch of their earliest childhood Steve had very few memories of him that didn’t involve Bucky carting a small sister around on his back or hip unless they were in school. It wasn’t till even baby Sarah had turned ten that Bucky and Steve had been able to skip babysitting duty on a regular basis, because by then the girls were old enough to look after themselves. (That had just meant that Becca was more likely to ditch Emily and Sarah and come running after Bucky and Steve to join their adventures.) Elizabeth Barnes hugged children like she breathed, and Bucky’s Da had been equally affectionate, if less physical. The Rogers apartment had been less exuberant; Sarah had always been so tired and Steve so frequently sick. But there had still been hugs in abundance.

And Steve remembered the total end of that, the desperate emptiness of the apartment after Ma’s death, the loneliness during the USO tour, and – worst of all – waking up at SHIELD HQ in New York and not touching another human being except to punch them or put pressure on their wounds for nearly three years. It would have been the easiest thing in the world for him to walk into a club and find someone who wanted to have sex with him, looking how he did these days, and sometimes he’d been sorely tempted, but lack of physical affection had been the smallest part of his loneliness and he knew it.

Still, it wore on you. It wore on you and it was impossible to explain to Bucky, despite what he’d said and despite what he’d been through, because Steve had been there for him at the other end of it, the way no one had been there for Steve or for Nat, and because Bucky had always been the kind of guy who treated his girlfriends right. And now, you know, Steve. So how to explain that to Bucky, the inability to believe that after all you were wanted, that someone thought you were the centre of their universe, that they loved you – that you weren’t alone anymore? How to tell him that the thought of sex, even sex with someone whose name you didn’t know, was far, far easier than this?

How to face someone like Bucky, someone who loved you that completely and selflessly and loyally, and say, sometimes both of the people you love have trouble believing that you do.

+++

Still, Bucky wasn’t an idiot. The next time Natasha came over she wandered in and tossed them both a two-fingered salute, smiling wide and bright to see them, and Bucky put his book down, unfolded himself from the couch in a move that was frankly unfair and probably illegal, and not only kissed her hello, but tugged her onto the couch with him afterwards.

“Hi,” she said, and there was that wide-eyed look, but she was smiling, too, and snuggled close to him.

It wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to touch her more often. Steve had thought it would be, but he’d been wrong. Like putting his hand through a science fiction force field, not because she didn’t want him to but because Steve didn’t know how any more than Natasha herself did. He steeled himself to brush his hand across her shoulder, swallowed before he pressed close to her side, was cautious and diffident as he tangled their fingers together for a moment. She didn’t say no and she didn’t pull away; but when she responded she did it hesitantly, as if afraid it wasn’t allowed. Part of him thought they were a couple of pathetic losers. They loved each other, didn’t they? So what was so hard?

That night Natasha was quiet in bed – she could run her mouth off like a sailor on shore leave when the mood took her – quiet and tender, a little distracted.

“Hey,” Bucky said at one point. “Are you OK?”

Natasha shook her head, long tangle of curls flying around her shoulders. “What? Of course.”

He ran his hands down her back to her hips and raised his eyebrows.

“Don’t be patronising,” she said sternly, but her mouth was twitching into a smile.

“Never,” Steve said cheerfully. “Hey, if you’re done with him, can I have him back?”

Tasha leaned over and pushed him back into the pillows with the flat of her hand on his chest. “You’re up to something.”

“Nu-uh,” said Steve.

“Well for a given definition of up,” said Bucky.

She sighed, trying and failing to make it sound long-suffering instead of amused. Bucky rocked his hips up in a move Steve knew very very well, and Tasha shivered and gasped quietly, lovely mouth falling open, and that was kind of that for the rest of the night, as far as talking went, because they all got distracted with each other.

+++

The next morning she cornered Steve in the kitchen with a flinty look and he counter-attacked by wrapping both arms around her shoulders and tugging her in for an embrace while the coffee machine ticked on. She was wearing Bucky’s shirt from yesterday and not much else, the cotton soft against his skin, her small lithe body warm and strong. The best defence was a good offence. It was so good to hold her. He half-expected an elbow in the ribs. The lines of her back and shoulders were tense and stiff.

“You _are_ up to something,” she said suspiciously.

“Not really,” said Steve.

“All this PDA.”

“It’s not in public.”

“You’ve never done it before.” _To me_ , he heard, and winced inwardly.

“I’ve sort of been operating on the assumption that you didn’t want it.”

Natasha’s mouth fell open a little. “I – uh?”

“ _Do_ you want it?”

“I didn’t think – I mean it’s very nice.”

“But?” He started to pull back.

The answer she couldn’t get her tongue around was given him easily by the way she reached up to hold his arms in place, pressed back against him. Steve couldn’t see her face and thought that was probably the way she needed it.

She drew a breath like she was about to dive into an icy sea and stay under for the full six and a half minutes he knew she was capable of. “It’s very nice,” she repeated, more softly, earnest.

He ducked and hid his face in the fall of her hair. “Yeah it is.” He hadn’t meant to sound like _that_ when he said it.

“Oh!” she said. Her nails dug red crescents into his forearms. After a moment she sighed, a hitching little noise. “Idiot.” And her whole body went soft and pliant against him, turning into him like – like it was the easiest thing in the world.

+++

After that, because Steve _was_ an idiot, it was Bucky’s turn to watch them, brow furrowed from time to time when he thought neither Steve nor Natasha was watching him back. He had a trick – he had always been the diplomatic one, the charmer, the one people listened to and obeyed without realising what they were doing – of herding them together (like recalcitrant kittens, Steve thought gloomily), tipping Natasha into Steve’s lap on the couch, manoeuvring Steve into Natasha’s arms for a kiss or an embrace.

“I knew there was something up,” Natasha said one afternoon when they were alone in the house. She was on Steve’s lap in her armchair, her head on his shoulder and her legs hanging off the arm. They had even managed to initiate it all by themselves. Bucky would be proud.

“It’s my fault,” said Steve. “I’ve got issues.”

She laughed. “Baby, so have I.”

“True.”

She poked him in the thigh with a finger, but didn’t deny it. “What does he think is going on?”

“Nothing, because nothing is,” said Steve.

“Are you sure? Cause he keeps looking at me like I’m a really hot stray he’s picked up from somewhere he doesn’t remember but totally adores even when I’m being an idiot.”

“Oh!” said Steve. “Yeah, you get used to that.”

“Do you?” Unsteadily.

A shiver went through him, remembering the day he’d flung the front door open and found Bucky Barnes on his porch, fixing that look on him for the first time in years. “No.”

+++

They had sex a lot, and Steve loved every second of it. It felt odd to say it to himself, to look at his hickeys in the bathroom mirror and think, _I love it when we fuck_ , a holdover of being told for so long it was a sin and shameful, even when his ordinary common sense told him different. His libido hadn’t particularly registered with him as being in existence for most of the time he was out of the ice – if he thought about sex he thought about it in terms of something that would make him feel human again, rather than something he would have fun doing – so the first time Bucky had stretched him out across their bed, the first time he and Natasha had opened him up with slick strong fingers and stroked him till he came all over himself before he’d ever got Bucky inside him was something of a revelation.

Every time was something of a revelation, even months later. Transcendent cosmic earth-shaking orgasms were all very well and good, but the physicality of it was even better to Steve. The closeness, the heat between them, friction and beard-burn, the aches of afterwards, sweat and hot skin, Natasha wet and tight around him, Bucky’s weight bearing him down, Natasha’s nails ripping his shoulders and back, the bruises they gave him, the way he could tip his head back and close his eyes and feel them all over him, no possible point of contact forgotten.

Being on the bottom like this, needless to say, was best of all, save only being properly in the middle, all of them on their sides and pressed together from knees to shoulders. Steve twisted and gasped when Bucky pushed in, long slow slide like he was being lit up from inside, all his nerves on fire, the even slower drag back out – “Get on with it, god, god!” and Natasha, lying mostly on his chest and mouthing at his nipples, laughed.

“Need a little peace and quiet?”

“Christ,” said Steve helplessly when Bucky laughed shortly, breathless, hair hanging in sweaty hanks over his eyes. "Yes, Tasha, wanna taste you." He pushed back and groaned and shook with every thrust, with the force of it, and wrapped his arms over Natasha’s thighs as she settled over him, balancing with her hands on the wall above his head; his nose pressed against her as they both shifted for the right position, his hands spread wide on her hips and thighs, and then he had it, and muffled his shout against her cunt when Bucky hit his prostate, licking long quick stripes along her labia, teasing her clit, lapping up her wetness, she was hot and swollen, hips rolling against his face, little gasps escaping her: “Yes god oh more, c’mon, Steve yes _,_ ” nonsense and love. Steve was shaking apart, beneath the two of them, shattering, there wasn’t anything of him left but them.

“Peace and quiet she says,” Bucky said when Natasha cried out; she laughed, moaning, turned to look at him over her shoulder: “Sorry, not taking complaints right now, ah, Steve, oh quit teasing,” and as if to encourage him to keep teasing Bucky moved faster, sharp short strokes that _were not helping_ if the mission objective here was to concentrate long enough to get Tasha to come. “Not complaining,” Bucky said, “never complaining, Natalia, turn around, want to see your face –“ but they were all too far gone for that, skirting the edges of orgasm near-simultaneously, on and on and over at last, Steve first, Natasha after him, the aftershocks shaking through him as Bucky fucked him, hands unsteady as he helped Tasha move to his side, drop on top of him; then, finally, with a shout, Bucky too, sprawling across the half of his chest Natasha wasn’t occupying, their combined weight crushing him just the right side of too much, his breathing skittering out of control, eyes closed against the dim lamplight, face wet and legs shaking a little. Bucky whispered something in Russian that made Tasha laugh softly, and it was no coincidence that the only Russian Steve knew was dirty talk.

But the best part was, he thought dizzily, what with the serum, in half an hour at the most it would be turn and turn about.

+++

It had been a wet and rainy summer so far, and the first day the sun came out and the temperature climbed a few paltry degrees you could feel the excitement in the air, as if all New York was scrambling out of its living rooms and plunging with happy abandon towards parks and beaches and balconies to catch the sunlight before it vanished again. Sam called; Sharon called; Clint called; Maria called. Bucky blew everyone off ruthlessly, flung open the big bay windows in their bedroom, and then came back to bed. It was ten thirty in the morning and the sun was slowly moving across the wooden floor, creeping towards the bed; the breeze was cool and the smell of sun-warmed earth after rain and damp grass floated in from the back yard. Natasha was dozing. Steve had moved exactly once since waking up at eight or so, namely to go to the bathroom.

“Staying in?” he murmured, too lazy to smile.

“All day,” said Bucky, wrapping himself around him.

And they did. Spending full days in bed had been a shameful necessity to Steve for much of his life. Now he discovered they were a luxury impossible to put into words, the way time stretched on endlessly as he lay and stared up at the ceiling and heard nothing but the breathing of the two people he loved most, the way it felt to lie in sun-warmed sheets and kiss and kiss for hours without it going anywhere, arousal a low hum under his skin, Natasha’s curves soft against him, Bucky’s stubble scratching as the day wore on. The white walls and the old wood floors glowed gold; Natasha’s hair had highlights the same colour, and the freckles Bucky had had as a kid were coming back in across the bridge of his nose. When they ordered take-out Natasha ran downstairs to pay the delivery boy in one of Steve’s button-downs – she stole their shirts whenever she was here, and god it was sexy – and they ate in bed as well, so that the whole room smelt of curry and egg-fried rice.

“Perfect day,” Natasha said softly, head pillowed on Bucky’s chest. Steve was on his other side, kissing the scars at his left shoulder slowly, tasting metal and salt skin. Bucky had flung his arm up at the elbow, a pleasant line of coolness resting against Steve’s flank.

He smiled. “Yeah it was.”

“Do we have house rules?” Bucky wondered, off on a tangent. “We should have house rules. House Rule Number One: Sundays are for staying in bed and making out all day.”

“Just making out?” Natasha said.

He looked at her. “Among other things.” Oh hell, Steve knew that grin, it was deadly. “How d’you feel about voyeurism, Tasha?”

Natasha’s head came off his chest with a jerk; she looked from Bucky to Steve and back and went red, mouth open in surprise.

+++

House Rule Number One, pertaining to Sundays in bed and extensive make-outs, was rigorously enforced (and in fact remained the only House Rule they ever bothered to make, unless you counted ‘don't tell Tony Stark where we live’), even when there was only two of them about. Reading was allowed; so was the TV; the point was staying in bed together. When it rained they closed the windows and crawled under the covers. Steve suspected that the neighbours had occasionally gotten an earful on days when they kept the windows open, but, rather to his own surprise, he didn’t care. Thirty-six hours in bed with Natasha and Bucky, nothing to do but touch them and be touched by them; he couldn’t be embarrassed. It didn’t compute, embarrassment, with what they did together.

+++

Hard to tell when Bucky stopped bothering to push them at each other. They touched so often that Steve just lost track, too busy enjoying it. What surprised him was that he never got used to it, to the spike of happiness that went through him when Natasha ducked under his arm and slid her own around his waist, when Bucky put his hand on the back of his neck and drew him close to kiss him. You got used to everything, apparently – supersoldier serums and wars and the future and metal arms and your Russian assassin girlfriend replacing all the windows in the house with bullet-proof glass – except happiness.

Steve was getting to be OK with that.

“It was a very neatly executed plot,” Natasha said one Sunday, a propos of nothing, voice muffled in Steve’s chest. He stiffened, surprised; then he had to bite back a groan at himself.

“Got results,” said Bucky, satisfied.

“Yeah?”

“Oh yes. Don’t get me wrong, the first few times your best girl and your boyfriend look at you like you’re the second coming of our lord Jesus Christ himself when you put your hands on them is pretty damn flattering, but it starts to get a little weird when the wider context is an otherwise-uninteresting or garden variety good morning kiss.”

Natasha and Steve looked at each other.

“Also some of us here have a frankly staggering lack of ordinary human self-awareness,” Bucky added, poking Steve in the side. “Naming no names.”

Steve said, “I didn’t wanna…”

“Steve,” said Bucky, in that voice that meant Steve was a fucking idiot and god alone knew _why_ Bucky loved him, but love him he did. Steve had never been able to look at him when he broke out that voice, not even as kids.

“What _did_ you say about me?” Natasha said, grinning.

“Nothing he couldn't just as easily have said about himself. You are both very, very messed up and very, very lucky I love you so much.”

“I thought that went without saying,” said Natasha.

“We love you too, you know,” said Steve.

Bucky looked at him; mouth tight, eyes wide; then a sudden sharp smile that made things twist in Steve’s chest. “I know,” he said.

Natasha propped her chin on her hand and said to Steve, “I think that’s the first time you’ve said it.”

“Can’t be.” Steve frowned at her.

“Sex I love yous don’t count.”

“Yeah, but –“

“First time,” Bucky said.

“James,” said Natasha.

“Natalia.” He was smiling.

“I love you.”

There it was again: mouth tight, eyes wide, a swallow as if he didn’t think –

“We’re messed up, he says to us,” said Steve to Natasha. “Hey, Tasha, I love you.”

She started laughing. “I love you too.”

“Is that everyone?” Bucky asked. “In all possible permutations? Can we get some sleep now?”

“Sleep!” said Natasha. “It’s four in the afternoon. I think.”

“Let’s ban clocks from Sundays,” said Steve, stretching lazily.

“Does anyone else feel like cherry pie and ice cream for dinner?” Bucky said.

“Not yet,” Natasha said, reaching over Steve to drag him close.

 

 

 


End file.
